Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what steps her Department is taking to help deliver full-fibre and gigabit-capable broadband to every home and business across the UK by 2025.

The Government is committed to delivering nationwide gigabit connectivity as soon as possible. Our target is a minimum of 85% gigabit-capable coverage by 2025, but this is not the limit of our ambitions and we will continue to work closely with the industry to get close to complete gigabit coverage as quickly as we can thereafter.

We are investing £5 billion so hard-to-reach areas can get ultra-reliable gigabit speeds, have already upgraded 600,000 premises, and in three years national coverage has rocketed from six per cent to 66 per cent.

We are making excellent progress on Project Gigabit. Broadband providers have so far been invited to bid for Project Gigabit contracts worth up to £292 million to upgrade up to 187,000 premises across Cumbria, Durham, Northumberland, Cambridgeshire, North Dorset and West Cornwall - with initial work expected to commence later this year.

Up to 2.5 million premises are included in the Project Gigabit procurement pipeline within England, with further details published in our latest Project Gigabit Delivery Plan.

In addition to our procurement pipeline, we are investing up to £210 million in the Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme to support rural communities with the cost of installing new gigabit-capable connections. To date, more than 63,500 households and small to medium businesses have benefited from an upgrade through the voucher scheme.

We are also providing funding of up to £110 million to connect up to 7,000 rural public buildings like schools, GP surgeries and libraries, which will act as hubs for connecting nearby homes and businesses.